Team size: 14 

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?  

Waycool Foods and Products is an agri-tech and agri-commerce company, aiming to build the world’s largest food development and distribution services company and to positively impact the lives of millions of farmers. To this end, WayCool Foods has expanded its operations across product sourcing, food processing, branding, and marketing, last-mile distribution, and farm inputs. The vision is to handle 1% of the world’s food transactions. I adopted a unique approach by combining a centralised legal function with a network of local lawyers in regions where the company had distributed operations. This hybrid engagement model had the tenets of a centralised and distributed legal function. This ensured consistency, quick action and scalability while maintaining cost efficiency. 

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in? 

The legal team supported the company to achieve several milestones in the last year, namely raising about $100m from venture capital funds, private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds, and family offices. Additionally, it has worked in raising venture debt and on two strategic acquisitions.  

It has introduced bi-lingual contracts, training workshops, contract stress testing and contract bullet-proofing initiatives for certain segments of the supply chain to add impetus to the velocity of deal closure, avoid disputes and for enhancing the company’s legal processes always staying ahead of the dynamic business ecosystem.  

To make the company future ready, my team is working with the company’s technology teams on the legal aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives for operating weather stations, crop disease prediction, agricultural produce assaying and storage activities.  

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel, what would it be and why?   

The advice to aspiring in-house would be to equip oneself with skills to be a business and commercial lawyer and not merely a lawyer. One should be nimble footed, commercially savvy, and agile to find the middle ground quickly and creatively in negotiations, transactions and litigations that would be beneficial for the company.